Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

  Simone de Beauvoir confronted the problem in her extensive study Old Age: “Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’” What is at issue, it seems to me, is a new and disturbing relationship with time. It is as though you advanced along a plank hanging over a canyon: once, there was a long reassuring stretch of plank ahead; now there is plank behind, plenty of it, but only a few plank paces ahead. Once, time was the distance into which you peered – misty, impenetrable, with no discernible landmarks, but reassuringly there. In old age, that dependable distance has been whisked suddenly behind you – and it does seem to have happened suddenly. Not long ago, there was some kind of balance – a fore and aft, as it were. No longer; time has looped back, regressed, it no longer lies ahead, but behind. It has turned into something else, something called memory, and we need it – oh dear me, yes, we need it – but it is dismaying to have lost that sense of expectation, of anticipation. Not only that, but we are aware of the change in ourselves – we are the same, but different, and equipped now with a comet trail of completed time, the memory trail.

  The mind does not always keep up – the subconscious, rather. In dreams, I am not always the self of today; I am often young, or younger, and if my children are present they have often become children again, obligingly – we have all jumped backwards. The mind cannot bear too much reality, it seems; in the same way, Jack is nearly always present in my dreams – it is twelve years since he died, but at night he returns, not always recognizably himself, but a shadowy dream companion figure that I always know to be him.

  When Simone de Beauvoir published Old Age in 1970 she was sixty-two, so from my viewpoint she was barely even on the approach road to the status itself. And, indeed, her own life experience is hardly cited at all in her long, densely researched, somewhat impassioned and rather wonderful book, which remains an illuminating investigation of the subject. She embarked on this, she says, because she saw a conspiracy of silence about old age, as though all were in denial, refusing to anticipate their own future, and, in consequence, choosing to ignore the situation of the old. She cited the appalling poverty and state neglect of the old in France and in the United States. But the book goes far beyond indignation. She wanted to explore the way in which old age is not just a biological but a cultural fact, and to that end she delved into ethnology. She plowed through history to see how the old had got on, from classical Greece to the present day, she pursued evidence of attitudes toward old age. She searched out the voices of the old. The book is laced with references from art and literature, from sociology, psychology, philosophy. It is compendious, exhaustive, extremely serious – there’s no light touch, with de Beauvoir – and impressive. She died at seventy-eight, so she got there herself – in 1986 you would certainly be considered old at seventy-eight.

  Whether or not she turned the analytic eye on her own old age, she eventually had a grim experience of it, managing the care of Jean-Paul Sartre in his wretched decline into infirmity and blindness. A harsh diminishment, for these two intellectual heavyweights, and nicely reflecting all that she had written of the alienation from oneself that is the condition of old age.

  I am sharing old age with friends, but not with a partner. In that, my situation is entirely average: three in five women over seventy-five in this country live alone. The men go first. Jack knew that, and expected it; after his retirement, he spent much time organizing our affairs, and would talk routinely of a future that excluded him, to my irritation. I would remonstrate, and he would smile amiably: “Statistics . . .” Well, he was right – though cheated, statistically, since he died at sixty-nine. The world is full of widows – several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage – forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience – everywhere, always – so get on with it and don’t behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn’t tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come – not so much to feel as to understand.

  A common experience – like old age itself, for those fortunate enough (if that is the right word) to get there. Here we are – the eighty-somethings – around 1.4 million of us in the UK, most of us with nothing much in common except the accretion of years, a historical context, and a generous range of ailments from which we have probably been allocated two or three. For each of us the experience is different, each of us endures – or challenges – it differently. Both endurance and challenge will of course be more successful from the vantage point of financial security, and if you are not too encumbered on the ailment front. My own mood can vary from day to day – glum if it is a bad back day, buoyant the next if that is better, there’s something interesting to look forward to, and the new tulips are out in the garden. But none of us escapes the daily challenge of the condition – so often newly surprising. However did I get like this? What happened?

  Age and infirmity; portmanteau phrase, like law and order. But apt, unfortunately. We are indeed infirm, and the main reason for that is loss of balance. You lose your sense of balance in old age. It comes on slowly, but the day arrives when you are always conscious of it. I don’t at all care to be at the top of an escalator; any flight of stairs is a matter of expedient attention. In the street, curbs have become unreliable; they seem to shoot up or down unexpectedly, to vary in height, and require stern treatment. The possibility of a fall grins and glares every day; what would have been a mere indignity twenty or thirty years ago could be catastrophic now. We fall about, we old, not because we are careless but because we no longer float around with easy balance, and a fall, for many, is the prelude to incapacity. I watch rugby players and footballers with wonder, as another species. And children – that glorious pliancy, which one knew, and has forgotten.

  Kingsley Amis fell over a great deal, in his later years. In his case, this would seem to have been on account of drink taken, more often than not; Martin Amis’s acute memoir Experience wryly records heaving his father up from the road, and the overhead crashes heard by his mother, living in the flat beneath. I have fallen twice in the last five years (drink not at issue); once on the pavement near home, having apparently slipped on a squashed tomato, and once on a treacherous staircase in France (“Une chute d’escalier,” I heard the ER nurse say, in a bored tone – they were shunted in daily, I suppose). I was lucky both times – no broken bones, though the staircase had my back raging for many weeks. And in neither case was balance the root cause, I think; those particular tumbles could have happened to a thirty-year-old. But both events shook me up, and made me realize that from now on any kind of fall was potentially disastrous. After seventy, stay vertical if you possibly can, is the rule.

  My artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt, fell off her horse when she was eighty-two. She was a few miles from home, on the edge of the Brendons, in west Somerset, and the horse, finding himself riderless, simply did what horses do, and headed for his stable. A neighbor spotted him, a search party was organized, and found Rachel on her way down from the hill, slightly bruised and annoyed about all the fuss. After that, we persuaded her to wear a whistle when out riding. She objected strongly, and had to be reminded that this strategy had saved the day for her own elderly uncle, many years before, who had come off his horse up on Exmoor and lay for hours in a bog with a fractured leg.

  Rachel died at eighty-six, working daily in her studio until her last illness. That horse survived her, the last of many she had owned, in this case an irritable pony called Fury (
“A tiresome creature,” she used to say, but she could no longer get up on to the big hunters she preferred). Fury himself was fifteen, which is a ripe age for a horse, and in the sad and onerous dispersal process after her death he became a central problem: nobody wanted him. Eventually, someone with field space was bribed to provide an expensive retirement.

  Fury was true to form, in this; he was all set to cost. Old age costs; it costs the nation, it costs those going through it. We contribute nothing, but require maintenance – a winter fuel allowance, free TV license, bus pass, free prescriptions, all the state indulgences. Those don’t add up to luxury, for anyone, any more than the state pension does other than provide basic subsistence. And old age has its needs, its greeds. You may not yearn for a Caribbean cruise – I don’t – but certain comforts have become essential, the accustomed perks that make daily existence a bit more than just that. I can’t start the day without a bowl of the right kind of muesli topped with some fruit and sheep’s milk yogurt; I can’t end it without a glass (or two) of wine. I need the diversions of radio and television. I want flowers in the house and something tempting to eat – these are greeds, I think, rather than needs. And – high priority – there is reading, the daily fix, the time of immersion in whatever is top of my book pile right now. As demands, requirements, all of this is relatively modest. Much of it – the reading, the flowers – goes back to prelapsarian days before old age. The difference, though, is that then there were further needs and greeds, and those seem to have melted away, to have tactfully absented themselves as though to make things a bit easier because they would indeed be an encumbrance now.

  I am no longer acquisitive. I was never exactly voracious, but I could fall prey to sudden lust: one simply could not live a moment longer without that sampler spotted in an antique shop, or that picture or rug or chair. No longer. I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.

  I don’t need or want excitement. Pleasure, enjoyment – yes. But that restless feeling that you must have something happen, you must look ahead, anticipate, you need a rush of adrenaline – that is gone, quite gone. Thanks be. Something to look forward to – yes. Seeing family, friends. Outings – a theater, a gallery, a jaunt. Time in Somerset with Josephine. But I no longer want that dangerous edge to things – anticipation heightened by risk, the sense of adventure. I am done with adventure.

  I was going to write: I am no longer aspirational. But that is not quite true. I do aspire in terms of wanting to do what I do as well as possible. I would still like to write a good book. But I don’t have that ferocity for achievement that I can remember from early writing days: write a good book or bust. I have never been particularly competitive – and writers can be competitive, a trait fostered by the spectator sport of literary prizes; nowadays I find that it is other writers who are providing me with my greatest pleasures, as I pounce on a new work by Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Adam Thorpe, Matthew Kneale, Lawrence Norfolk, Anne Tyler, Jane Gardam, a bunch of others . . . Or as I light on one of the newer, younger writers, with the recognition that – yes, here is the sort of thing I want. I suppose that this is the reader in me taking command. But it is also, I think, a writerly satisfaction in seeing it done by others as I would wish it done – in seeing the show kept on the road. Maybe elderly athletes enjoy watching the hundred meters in the same spirit.

  Out with acquisition, excitement, and aspiration except in tempered mode. And, on another front, I don’t in the least lament certain emotions. I can remember falling in love, being in love; life would have been incomplete without that particular exaltation, but I wouldn’t want to go back there. I still love – there is a swathe of people that I love – but I am glad indeed to be done with that consuming, tormenting form of the emotion.

  So this is old age, and I am probably shedding readers by the drove at this point. If you are not yet in it, you may be shuddering. If you are, you will perhaps disagree, in which case I can only say: this is how it is for me. And if it sounds – to anyone – a pretty pallid sort of place, I can refute that. It is not.

  Certain desires and drives have gone. But what remains is response. I am as alive to the world as I have ever been – alive to everything I see and hear and feel. I revel in this morning’s March sunshine, and the cream and purple hellebore just out in the garden; I listen to a radio discussion about the ethics of selective abortion, and chip in at points; the sound of a beloved voice on the phone brings a surge of pleasure. Yesterday, I rejoiced in the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy (for the third time) – that singing color, that exuberance (and he is seventy-five); I am reading John Lanchester’s Capital, slowly because it is the sort of capacious novel I like and I don’t want it to end. I think there is a sea change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigors now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. Maybe that’s why Hockney is painting like this, now. People are of abiding interest – observed in the street, overheard on a bus. The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day – food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I’ve seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.

  On a good day, aches and pains in abeyance. On a bad day – well, on a bad day a sort of shutter comes down, and the world is dulled. But I know that it is there, the shutter will roll up, with luck, the sun will come out.

  The stereotypes of old age run from the smiling old dear to the grumbling curmudgeon. In fiction, they are rife – indeed fiction is perhaps mainly responsible for the standard perception of the old, with just a few writers able to raise the game. Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori is a black comedy, with a group of elderly plagued by sinister phone calls: “Remember you must die.” No stereotypes, but a bunch of sharply drawn individuals, convincingly old, bedeviled by specific ailments, and mainly concerned with revisions of their pasts in terms of will-making and the machinations of relationships. Kingsley Amis also went for comedy, in Ending Up, with a group cohabiting in a cottage and busy scoring points off each other – funny, but with a bleak undertone. Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is neither comedy (though not without humor) nor stereotype, but strong writing about the view both of and from old age. And he was old – eighty-four – when the book was published, whereas neither Spark nor Amis were – Muriel Spark was forty-one when Memento Mori came out. Just three examples; they spring to mind simply because memorable and effective writing about old age is rare, though there are of course other instances. My point is that old age seems to be a danger zone for many novelists, somehow even more of a challenge than the universal problem of writing about and from the point of view of a man if you are a woman, and vice versa; we all have to deal with that unless we are to be left with a very curiously populated novel. But the old and the young are, somehow, the elusive element; equally, few novelists are good at children.

  “What do they think has happened, the old fools, / To make them like this?” Any reference to Philip Larkin’s poem in this context is almost a cliché. The poem marries perception of age with stark truth: “Well, / We shall find out.” He never did, of course, dying at sixty-three. And the perception is of drooling, confused, incapable old age – not a stereotype so much as an evocation, both harsh and reflective.

  Those of us not yet in the departure lounge and still able to take a good look at what has made them – us – like this can find some solace in doing so. What has happened is such an eccentric mixture of immediate and long-drawn-out, the arrival of a condition that has been decades in the making but seems to have turned up this mornin
g. The succession of people that we have been – Sir Thomas Browne’s “varieties of himself” – are suddenly elided into this – final? – version, disturbingly alien when we catch sight of a mirror, but also evocative of a whole range of known personae. What we have been still lurks – and even more so within. This old-age self is just a top dressing, it seems; early selves are still mutinously present, getting a word in now and then. And all this is interesting – hence the solace. I never imagined that old age would be quite like this – possibly because, like most, I never much bothered to imagine it.

  My attitude towards these earlier selves – varieties of myself – is peculiar, I find. It is kindly, indulgent – as though towards a younger relative, sometimes impatient (you idiot . . .), occasionally grateful. I’m grateful for all that work done – a bunch of other people wrote my books, it can seem. I feel kindly towards those recognizable former incarnations, in whom I can see my present self – reading Sir Thomas Browne in the 1970s, digging our first garden in Swansea in 1961, entranced when my first baby laughs – spring of 1958. I’m angry about the mistakes, the deficiencies, the times I should have done differently.